Antigonus

Please do not make a Stalker for the purpose of healing your team. That is by far the most stupid way to use a Stalker in PvP.

Stalkers are killers, not healers.

You can use support powers to help out your team occasionally, but you will not keep them alive from a determined team. Trying to do so will only get you farmed. Trying to use Medicine pool from a Stalker will not save them because it is slow and interuptable and has a short range. You would be better served on a Stalker by letting your team takes the hits to move in and take out the opposition with AS.

1) True. Level 33 is the sweet spot.

2) IO sets only apply if used in the powers that are active in a given zone. Sets put into level 32 powers and above will not work in SC regardless of the IO level, so you might as well slot them higher. The exception to this is purple sets. Those are good at any level.

3) Any slots in a power will work if that power is available, regardless of when those slots were put into the power.

4) Purple IO are only available to bo slotted at 50. I have heard of purples dropping at lower levels, but they can't be slotted until 50 regardless.

Check ParagonWiki for sets and bonuses available.

Personally, I would ditch stealth pool and take Leadership. Your big debuffs require a to-hit check, so Tactics is almost a must. Also Ice damage is LOL these days so Assault really helps. It's a trade off of sorts. Phase gives you better survivability, but Leadership will let you actually get kills. I'm more of an offensive type, so I went with Leadership.

Slot Arctic Fog for resistance not defense. The little bit of defense you get from it won't help in the current environment. Between AF and SharkSkin, you'll have extra resistance to almost all damage types. I would say the same for the shields, but that's a personal choice. People will argue it both ways.

If the devs actually ever PvPed they might know what it is we have been complaining about.


But they don't, so they won't.

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The moral of the story is PuG's are worthless and if you participate in them you're pretty much asking to fail.

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Boy, it's a good thing everybody that plays has the luxury of a developed group to play with on call at all hours.




Oh wait, they don't.

I guess those of us normal folk just have to get by with what's available.

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I've never had a static party. Never had a particularly supportive SG (never particularly threw myself at one either, so not complaining). For me, PUGs are where the rubber meets the road; I'd get bored playing with the same ATs all the time.

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That's pretty much how I feel. Most of the regulars I played with quit after ED and GDN. The ones that stayed through that quit after the issue 13 PvP cluster [censored]. The only teams I get now are PUGs because I tend to play some odd hours. I personally like PUGs. I think it's more of a challenge in a game that has few challenges left.

If anything, PUGs have made me more tolerant of bad players. Too bad not everybody can look so kindly on others.

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The moral of the story is PuG's are worthless and if you participate in them you're pretty much asking to fail.

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Boy, it's a good thing everybody that plays has the luxury of a developed group to play with on call at all hours.




Oh wait, they don't.

I guess those of us normal folk just have to get by with what's available.

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Problem is, people set the bar too high for empaths.

Asking the average player, who is not always that great at the game to have an awareness of everyones health for healing, everyones buff bar for buffing whilst maintaining a view of the battle so that they can help out with blasting is just asking for too much. Yes, good players can do this. The average player will struggle to achieve it.



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I agree completely. That's why, in my opinion, people will want a healer of one type or another.

Bad players are bad no matter what you try to do to help them. In that LGTF I mentioned, we tried repeated to get this guy to use his primary. All the helpfull comments turned to sarcastic remarks, then demands for better performance till finally he got kicked.

PUGs are full of bad players. A bad player with a healer mentality just might keep a team alive, while a bad player with a blaster mentality might just get a team wiped. I know which one I'm gonna take.

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So you'd prefer he ignore his blast set, get the medicine pool and heal constantly? Because lol thats even less helpful.

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If I have to choose between two kinds of useless, yeah I'll take the heal spammer. In most cases those heals are far more usefull than some weak blasts. The exception being Sonic Blast. That's some good stuff there and that Defender would get yelled at for not blasting.

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Thats the thing though. healing is reactionary, and doesn't scale to content.

A heal doesn't remain as potent when the mobs do to keep parity. A buff does.



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That's not entirely true.

While capped defense may scale to always protect 95% of the time, if that 5% is enough to damage you faster than your natural regen can recover, you will lose without heals. Same with capped resistance. There is no way in this game to completely stop all incoming damage from mobs that aren't held, and if that damage exceeds your ability to stop it you will be defeated. In my experience, people want healers specifically so they can push the envelope just past the point where buffs alone can't keep a team alive.

I guess the obvious answer is to only play Controllers/Dominators.

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I've been wanting to try PvP but the Arena was dead when I checked and I haven't been to one of the official zones yet. It's possible that my server (Victory) may also be part of the problem.

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When server transfers went live most anybody that had interest in PvP went to Freedom or Virtue. You won't find much action on other servers.

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people asking for a "healer" want at THE VERY LEAST one heal

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If only that were true...

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I did a LGTF last night with an Emp Defender that spent all his time blasting. Didn't use any buffs unless asked and didn't even heal. We didn't often need the heals, but they would have been nice when we did.

Lol Emps that think they're Blasters.

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I have seen people limit thier choices for a kin, a rad, a stone tanker, no dark armors, etc. It is not limited to just defenders but defenders get the most bent out of shape.

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Exactly. I can't remember the last time I did an ITF without the leader waiting till he found a Kin to start. I was kicked from a LGTF just before starting because the leader found his Kin at the last minute and my Widow was deemed expendable. If anything, I would say that more people get left out or kicked from teams in favor of Kins then they do Healers, but we don't see people complaining about it here.

Stupid people are stupid. Getting all worked up over it and coming to the forums to whine about it isn't gonna change that.

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And no, improvements to it wouldn't change it. I personally loathe PVP in RPGs.

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Personally, while I don't care for it myself, it doesn't matter much to me that it exists. I'm just glad that it's in very specific locations that must be intentionally entered. That makes it much easier for me to avoid the whole thing.

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Which is exactly why they should not have made the changes they did. They mucked it all up to try to attract players who would rather chew off their own arm then play it.

I have completely lost all faith in our out of touch dev team.

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The problem is some people are so obsessed with disproving the whole "we need a healer or we'll die" theory, that they have actually gone one step further and tried to prove that healers are not just not needed, but are indeed useless.


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You hit the nail right on the head.

This is such a polarizing topic that it rarely ends in any kind on concensus. Each side will usually go to extremes to make their point. The whole thing is a stupid argument all around in large part because nobody can argee on what exatly is being argued. Half the time is spent arguing about what the definition of "healer" is.

Look people, "healer" is not an AT or a power set. It's a playstyle. You may or may not agree with it, but that doesn't matter. You have no more right to judge healers than you do Blappers, Skrankers, Offenders, or any other playstyle you may not agree with. Don't like it? Don't play with them. But don't come here and rail against them for doing what the game gives them the freedom to do.

Each persons individual preferance in that regard is irrelavent to the person playing their character. If a person playing the healer is consistantly getting teams and leveling, do you think they care what your opinion of their play is? I know I don't. I'll keep playing what works for me and the teams that ask for my services. If you don't like what I'm doing, you can bugger off for all I care. Don't invite me to your teams and we'll both be happy.

I'm sorry that some people think that healers are just a bunch of mouth breathing monkeys pounding their keyboards, but those people are wrong. It's just another way to play the game.

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You're weighing the benefits of the Radiation and Storm debuffs too heavily. Purple Patch will quite quickly reduce the incredible benefits that you can gain from tohit debuffs to much less than you actually give them credit for. AVs are similarly resistant though additional reasons, though they'll also get benefit from the purple patch (Link for the chart of scaling AV debuff resistances).

While your numbers are appropriate for fighting even level enemies, you'll quickly find the debuffs to be lacking quite the punch you expected when taking on challenging scenarios. Buffs are never reduced in effectiveness. You may want to specifically mention this, especially if since you brought up +5 bosses.

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Good point. That would mean that, against AVs healing is actually a better form of mitigation than debuffs. Oh that's gonna rankle some folks.

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If you take the time to read my OP, you will find my argument does not require numbers. I'm talking about players that spam "lvl XX healer" in broadcast, and how there's not a consistent definition for the term 'healer.'

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So your arguments are so conclusive, you don't need actual proof to back them up?

To the OP, good work. Unfortunately, the healer haters will completely ignore anything you might have proven in favor of hyperbole and anecdotal "evidence". The hate runs deep here on the forums regardless of how popular the playstyle is in game.

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And the only reason buffs aren't good at low levels are because they're not unlocked yet.

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I think that was the point of the statement.

Until level 12, every Empath is a healer whether they like it or not

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No that was the 'pvp dev' that Ex introduced to everyone the night of the ladder kickoff.

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Wait, they actually got a dev for that? Where'd he come from, Toon Town?

I have been experiencing this as well. It occurs most often when I change zones. It will fully recharge but not fire dispite being set for auto.

Bug it.

Healings for cheaters yo!

lrn2pvp.

By organized PvP I assume you mean arena teams on Test server. Generally speaking, the only melee ATs the work well in that environment are Stalkers. SS/Fire Brutes are good in zones if built right. Range is still king in PvP no matter where you go, and a Brute is going to be hard pressed to compete against ranged ATs.

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So it's better to replace something broken with something stupid and broken?

Pre-13 PvP was far from perfect, but PvP 2.0 is two steps backward and sideways.

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Now hold on. I could have almost have agreed with your prev post - 4 sec sup on buffs may be much - BUT thats under the assumption that the rest, including DR, is a general improvement.

So I would say they replaced something broken with something thats better, but still broken.

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In what ways is it better? What problems existed before that are now absent? Well, considering that there are fewer people PvPing now than there was pre-13, I would guess that most would disagree with you.

Notice, I said PvPing. That means not just doing it to farm PvP IOs in the arena.

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Admit it though, if this is a failed system, I12 PvP was also a failed system.

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So it's better to replace something broken with something stupid and broken?

Pre-13 PvP was far from perfect, but PvP 2.0 is two steps backward and sideways. It fixed none of the issues that people complained about and added a whole slew of new stupid.

I could almost forgive them the stupid suppression except for how it effects support. A heal gets a 4 second suppression? Really? A buff gets 4 seconds? It's just retarded. If they got rid of suppression for heals and buffs it would make support a viable option again, even with DR. But then, I guess they don't want that happening in their PvP because heals and buffs are for dirty cheaters that need to lrn2pvp.

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Buffs are important too. I think anyone who ignores either buffs or heals is a noob. I expect rads to take and use their heal. I expect empaths to take and use their buffs. The sets are balanced around the whole. The anti-healer forces want to minimize the role of healing, to the detriment of their teams, in my opinion. They are no different that the folks who do the opposite and think heals are the end all of mitigation.

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EG speaks the truth.